Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

Is hating Trump supporters eating you up inside?

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I hate Trump supporters. Especially the working class ones.

The white dudes I grew up with who work in construction alongside Latinx people but who want to “build the wall.” The family friends on Medicare who celebrated Trump’s tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy.

I want to punch them in the face. I want to hold them down and force feed them the awareness that the rich and powerful are swindling them.

But that feels shitty. Not because it’s wrong of me to want to do those things.

Because hate burns. It tenses up my shoulders and my gut. It makes me forget to breathe, to feel my feet on the ground. Hating ends up hurting me.

The 5th century Buddhist scholar Buddhaghoṣa wrote:

By [getting angry] you are like a man who wants to hit another and picks up a burning ember or excrement in his hand and so first burns himself or makes himself stink.

Here’s how the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön puts it in her book “Start Where You Are”:

When you get to tell someone off, you might feel pretty good for a while, but somehow the sense of righteous indignation and hatred grows, and it hurts you.

It’s hard to let go of hate—even if it’s burning shit. Part of me thinks letting go is rolling over and giving up. I’m afraid of what would happen if there was no one to fight back against Trump supporters.

But another, deeper part of me knows they’re human beings. And like all human beings, they are suffering.

They just have a different story for why they suffer and who’s to blame. A story that happens to benefit the rich and powerful. A story, of course, that endangers people who don’t look like me.

But because you don’t hate someone doesn’t mean you can’t hold them accountable, set boundaries, and defend yourself and others. As social worker and author Brené Brown says:

The most compassionate people I’ve interviewed over the past 13 years were absolutely the most boundaried … loving and generous and really straightforward with what’s okay and what’s not okay.

I once heard a story in a meditation class taught by Kaira Jewel Lingo that helps me navigate all this complexity. It comes from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who lived through the Vietnam War and its aftermath.

Hanh tells of a 12-year-old girl who was raped by a pirate while trying to return to Vietnam after the war. The girl jumped in the ocean and drowned herself.

“When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate,” Nhat Hanh writes. “You naturally take the side of the girl.”

But, he says, when he paused and looked more deeply, he saw it differently.

I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate … I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.

Can you imagine? Seeing your homeland occupied and destroyed. Watching your friends and family get slaughtered. Hearing about horrific things happening to your people. And still not hating.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s story reminds me to look for myself in Trump supporters. I know that hate they feel. I’ve felt that same fear. I’ve hurt someone I didn’t mean to because I was afraid. I’m pissed and terrified about all the problems in the world. I’m human too.

If Thich Nhat Hanh can do it. If angel Kyodo williams, a Black queer Buddhist teacher, can see the fear in Trump supporters. Then I — a white, cisgendered, heterosexual man who grew up fishing and shooting guns — can too.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. If you’d like to work with me on your meditation practice or being more mindful, reach out. Get my writing straight to your email inbox here.

Download my free ebook on starting and sticking with a meditation practice here.

I rolled my eyes at people who said they felt gratitude. Until now.

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Google “gratitude” and the articles are damn near infinite.

“Gratitude: How to Change Negative Beliefs, Be Happy, And Become Successful.”

“How to Hack Gratitude”

“8 Ways to Have More Gratitude Every Day”

Part of me wants to roll my eyes. What do these people mean by “gratitude?” Do they actually feel appreciation? Or are they just trying to appear like a good person?

Maybe they’re just guilty for having privilege. A, “I should feel grateful because there are starving kids in Africa,” sort of thing.

But that’s because I’ve never understood what gratitude is—until now.

One of my goals for the rest of the year is to do Tibetan tonglen for five minutes every morning. Tonglen is a “giving and taking” meditation practice. You imagine someone who is suffering and breathe in their pain as dark, polluted air. Then you breathe cool, healing air towards them.

The idea is to develop compassion for ourselves and others. The Zen Buddhist teacher Roshi Joan Halifax says that tonglen “asks us to invite suffering into our being and let it break open the armor of our heart. The tender spaciousness that arises awakens selfless warmth and compassion.”

Tonglen is becoming a doorway to an emotion I’ve been rolling my eyes about for years: gratitude.

This morning I imagined my grand aunt who recently fell and broke her wrist. I felt compassion, sure. I don’t want her to suffer any longer. But I also felt appreciation for the fact that my body is in good shape. That I have my health. That I’m not cooped up alone and hurting during coronavirus.

And it wasn’t an intellectual thing. It wasn’t a should, like, “I should be grateful because I’m healthy and others aren’t.” It was an organic sense of appreciation in my body. My shoulders softened. The center of my chest—dare I say it, my heart—became tender.

As the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön writes, tonglen “is designed to help ordinary people like ourselves connect with the openness and softness of our hearts.”

For a brief moment, maybe a few seconds, I was in awe of this life that I’ve been given. I was aware—in my bones—that it all could be gone tomorrow.

The thing about gratitude—the heart wrenching thing—is that once you start feeling it, you start feeling it for everything. “Gratitude needs practice,” writes the palliative care social worker Stephen Jenkinson, who has been with hundreds of the dying. “Gratitude for the things that don’t seem to help, that aren’t sought out or welcome—that’s a demanding kind, and it is needed in hard times.”

This morning, I also felt gratitude for my bum knee. I appreciated the parts of my heart that are broken from losing people I love. For a few seconds, I even was grateful for coronavirus giving me the opportunity to slow down and be with myself.

I’ve learned so much from the pain I’ve been through. From the perspective of gratitude, it’s all a gift.

That’s gratitude—even if it makes me want to roll my eyes.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. If you’d like to work with me on your meditation practice or being more mindful in your life, reach out.

Download my free ebook on starting and sticking with a meditation practice here.

Turn your guilt about being privileged into solidarity

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It feels like all I’m doing is waiting.

For enough testing and a vaccination. For another spike in cases to overwhelm hospitals. For a text saying, “I’ve got the virus.” For the Trump administration to help front-line workers. For the sun to warm the garden soil. Most of all, to get back to “normal” life.

But this morning I grew tired of waiting so I went for a walk. Wind stirred the trees. Birds spoke in all directions. My feet scraped the driveway gravel. I should do this more often, I thought, squinting at the sun.

I thought about the American Dream, how it numbs us to the discomfort of waiting. It tricks us into moving, going, building, innovating, conquering, working for someone else, heading west, faking it until we make it. Anything but waiting. Hence the (right-wing, corporate-bankrolled) protests to “reopen” the economy. Americans can’t wait.

The truth is many of us can — because we have to. The single mother working two jobs. The son using drugs under an overpass. The 40 percent who don’t have $400 for an emergency. The more than 50 percent who are unhappy with their jobs. For the vast majority, there are just dreams put on hold. “One day.”

If enough of us stopped dreaming and slowed down, stayed put, came together, this capitalist economy would crash. That’s why the rich and powerful are so afraid of unions and other ways of coming together. That’s why they keep selling the dream.

A hawk’s shadow crossed the driveway, pulling me out of my head. Dogs barked. Winter wheat swayed in the fields.

I felt the never-ending space all around me and thought about my luck. I was born into a middle-class family who supported me through college. I survived the Great Recession working for companies contracting with federal government. As a writer, I’ve been working from home just fine. I’ve even been teaching meditation to students from around the world. No one in my family has lost their job. As far as we know, no one has had the virus.

Guilt bubbled up inside. But solidarity did too, and it was stronger. I felt connected to everyone feeling impatient — to those waiting for the virus to leave their body, to those waiting for their nursing shift to end, to those standing in the food bank line. I noted in my mind to donate more money to restaurant workers, rent strikers, sex workers, immigrant families, indigenous people — the most vulnerable.

“Birds are in the garden eating bugs,” my dad said as we passed. He walked to the garden and started the purple tractor, which knocked until it warmed to a steady purr.

I remembered one of my favorite stories about the Buddha. As a young boy, he visited a farm and caught a glimpse of mindfulness, being fully in the present moment, connected, free, in awe of the world. He sat under a tree and watched laborers till the land. He saw a bird peck at a worm in the fresh dirt and then an eagle swoop down on the bird. Compassion overwhelmed him.

“How can be it right that the laborer should toil and the master should live on the fruits of his labor?” he thought. He also realized that had the laborers not been tilling, the bird wouldn’t have seen the worm, and the eagle wouldn’t have seen the bird. Everything is connected and all actions have consequences, he thought.

What am I waiting for? This is it — it always is.

As Dogen, the 13th century Zen Buddhist master wrote:

The real way circulates everywhere; how could it require practice or enlightenment? The essential teaching is fully available; how could effort be necessary? Furthermore, the entire mirror is free of dust; why take steps to polish it? Nothing is separate from this very place; why journey away?

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